Gender Differences in Communication

The idea that men and women speak a different language is well-worn in regards to personal relationships, but John Gray , author of the famous relationship guide Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus says the same communication difficulties we struggle with in our personal lives also play out in the office.

Language and gender

Although researchers have long agreed that girls have superior language abilities than boys, until now no one has clearly provided a biological basis that may account for their differences. For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa show both that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI , the researchers measured brain activity in 31 boys and in 31 girls aged 9 to 15 as they performed spelling and writing language tasks. The tasks were delivered in two sensory modalities -- visual and auditory. When visually presented, the children read certain words without hearing them. Presented in an auditory mode, they heard words aloud but did not see them. Using a complex statistical model, the researchers accounted for differences associated with age, gender, type of linguistic judgment, performance accuracy and the method -- written or spoken -- in which words were presented.

Release Date: February 17, And how they said it can have an effect on which one gets a promotion in the workplace, says a linguist at the University at Buffalo whose specialty is the structure and history of language. Studies have shown that the main goal of men's speech is to get something done, while the objective of women's is to get along, according to Jeannette M. Ludwig, Ph. Because women's use of language differs from men's -- they use much more indirect language and hesitant tones to elicit behaviors -- they may be excluded from office team-building efforts, she notes. For example, men assume that people want to hear what they have to say. Women don't.

Much research has been conducted on the different ways that men and women use language to communicate. Two main theories exist to try and explain the differences in male and female language; the first holds that men use language to dominate, while women use it to confirm their subordination. The second theory proposes that male and female language is the result of men and women being a part of very different subcultures and having very different life experiences; thus, neither male nor female language is superior, just different. The language patterns for each gender have become less defined as gender roles have grown less rigid. Female displays of authority and male displays of emotion through language have become increasingly acceptable in society over the past few decades. Nonetheless, some noticeable differences between the way men and women speak still persist.

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This article aims to supplement the information given in Vasko , which is a revised and extended version of Ojanen In Ojanen , the data consisted of interviews with 19 informants from 15 rural localities.

Research into the many possible relationships, intersections and tensions between language and gender is diverse. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, and, as a bare minimum, could be said to encompass work notionally housed within applied linguistics , linguistic anthropology , conversation analysis, cultural studies, feminist media studies, feminist psychology, gender studies, interactional sociolinguistics, linguistics, mediated stylistics , sociolinguistics and media studies. In methodological terms, there is no single approach that could be said to 'hold the field'. Discursive, poststructural, ethnomethodological, ethnographic, phenomenological, positivist and experimental approaches can all be seen in action during the study of language and gender, producing and reproducing what Susan Speer has described as 'different, and often competing, theoretical and political assumptions about the way discourse, ideology and gender identity should be conceived and understood'. The study of gender and language in sociolinguistics and gender studies is often said to have begun with Robin Lakoff 's book, Language and Woman's Place , as well as some earlier studies by Lakoff. The edited volume Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self [5] is often referred to as a central text on language and gender.